Radium Hot Springs — Canada

The Kootenay gateway town where bighorn sheep wander the main street and natural hot pools sit inside a narrow canyon of orange-streaked rock.

The bighorn sheep got to Radium Hot Springs before I did, in the sense that by the time I arrived they had clearly established squatter’s rights on the townsite. I came around a bend on the highway into town and found four of them standing on the shoulder, entirely unbothered by traffic, one of them chewing on something in a hotel parking lot with the proprietary air of an animal that considers this its home and everyone else a temporary inconvenience. Locals told me this happens constantly enough that nobody stops to photograph it anymore, though I did, repeatedly, because I am not from here and it has not stopped being strange to me.

The Gate to Kootenay

Radium sits directly at the west entrance to Kootenay National Park, at the point where the highway drops out of the mountains through a dramatic, narrow gorge called Sinclair Canyon — red-orange rock walls closing in tight enough on both sides that the road feels squeezed through a keyhole before it opens back out into the valley. This geography is exactly why the hot springs exist here: mineral water works its way up through fault lines in the canyon rock and emerges naturally hot, and the Radium Hot Springs pools are built right into that canyon, walled in by the same red rock that frames the highway above.

Bighorn sheep standing on a rocky roadside near the townsite of Radium Hot Springs

Soaking Between Two Parks

I went to the pools at the end of a long hiking day, arriving right around dusk when the crowds thin and the canyon walls start losing their colour to shadow while the water keeps its heat regardless. It’s a strange, specific pleasure, floating in water that’s essentially odourless (unlike the sulphurous pools you find elsewhere) with steam curling up against rock that geologists say has been shaped by this exact process for tens of thousands of years. The pool complex is unglamorous in the best way — no resort polish, just changing rooms, a snack counter, and two adjoining pools, one properly hot and one merely warm, both looking directly up at canyon walls rather than at each other.

Steam rising from the hot pool at dusk with canyon walls glowing orange in the fading light

The town itself is small and functional, built almost entirely around servicing people passing between Kootenay and Banff national parks, but it has a warmth to it that comes from not trying too hard — a handful of motels, a good bakery, and sheep wandering the golf course like they own the fairway, which by the local logic they probably do.

When to go: Year-round for the springs, but autumn offers the best combination — cooler air against hot water, the canyon in low golden light, and far fewer people than the July and August peak.